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We have to enquire into the existence of the Numbers in the
Intellectual. Are they Ideas added to the other Ideas? Or are
they no more than necessary concomitants to the Ideas?
In the latter case, Being, as the first [in the Intellectual]
would give us the conception of the Monad; then since Being
produces motion and rest, Three exists; and so on for all the
other members of the realm of Being. Or perhaps there is one
monad for each member, or a monad for the first, with a dyad for
its next, since there exists a series, and a corresponding number
for every successive total, decad for ten, and so on.
If, on the contrary, Number is a direct production of the
Intellectual-Principle [an Idea in itself], there is the question
whether it preceded or followed the other Ideas.
Plato, where he says that men arrived at the conception of Number
by way of the changes of day and night- thus making the concept
depend upon variation among things- seems to hold that the things
numerable precede and by their differences produce number: Number
then would consist in a process within the human mind passing
onwards from thing to thing; it results by the fact that the mind
takes count, that is when the mind traverses things and reports
their differences; observing pure identity unbroken by
difference, it says One. But there is the passage where he tells
us that the veritable Number has Being, is a Being; this is the
opposed view that Number is no product of the reckoning mind but
a reality in itself, the concept of which is reawakened in the
mind by changes in things of sense.
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